Preamble,
‍
Yaman is a survivor. A man who has chosen to confront the finitude of existence by braving weightlessness. In 1999, a deadly earthquake killed 50,000 people in Istanbul. Yaman will not be one of them, but his destiny keeps him alive, the load-bearing walls hold and awaken in him an instinct for survival. Surviving boredom, ease, bitterness and resentment, the man will rise up and decide to live. To honor every minute of existence. Intensely and passionately. Yaman aligns soul and body to rise above the little things that eat away at dreams. I knew him as a breakdance champion and genius dancer, and now I find him a flying hero in the lens. As a child, he was glued to the screen, admiring Bruce Lee and Charlie Chaplin; today, he's the hero. The tender, courageous father, the aesthetic acrobat who spreads his invisible wings to remind us that flight lasts but an instant. Fragile and powerful. A tiny instant and an eternity.

Nikos Aliagas.

On the night of August 16 to 17, 1999, 3:05 a.m., 30 km from Istanbul, 7.4 on the Richter scale, the earth shook for 45 seconds, killing 40,000 people. I'm alive, the building survived. Feeling the earth tremble and hearing its rumbling is like tasting God's wrath. I was 22. In 2008, I had a small camera in my hands. My first reaction was to set the timer and photograph myself in the air. Without knowing why. Then I kept doing the same thing over and over again, without really planning ahead, always on the spur of the moment.  

One day, 1 year after I'd started taking photos, someone asked me why I jumped on all my photos. At the time, I didn't know how to answer, I just felt it was a need I had. The next day, the question was still echoing in my head, then a memory appeared, like a flash, I was in the corridor of the apartment the night of the earthquake, after the tremor I said to myself "ah if I could fly, I would never have felt the earth tremble".

Suddenly, everything made sense. I'm a bboy (breakdancer, a dance practiced mainly on the ground), I've always had a love for the ground, the earth, and to have felt it tremble made me deeply afraid and increased my esteem, as well as a certain fear of its power, so my first reflex with this camera was to jump, to fly, to freeze myself above the ground, as if I were posing with it, as if I could see it, watch it. Each jump is a tribute to the souls that flew away that night.
So I fly.